Many corporate organizations have elaborate methods to control the flow of memorandum, publications, notices, and other printed information within the organization. An organization may limit the types of documents employees can distribute at work, and in some cases, control which persons within an organization communicate with each other. For example, the organization may prohibit the distribution of memoranda to all employees in order to reduce photocopying costs; it may except this rule for individuals with specific corporate positions, such as the president or chairman. As another example, an organization may filter documents that are to be sent to specific persons or departments, or it may automatically copy (archive) documents distributed by certain persons or departments. Finally, organizations ordinarily have rules that prohibit distribution of certain types of documents, such as those containing disparaging, sexist, or profane materials. These various rules are typically documented as part of the organization's business communication policies, and managed by the personnel, human resources, or other departments.
Most organizations today also use electronic messaging systems, or e-mail, for inter- and intra-company communications. Generally, an e-mail system comprises one or more post offices, zero or more mail servers and a relatively large number of e-mail client applications. The post offices are distribution mechanisms which receive e-mail messages from client applications (both within the organization and external thereto) and transfer these e-mail messages to other post offices associated with the specified recipients, who again are both within and external to the organization or system. Conventional post offices operate on a store and forward model, where an e-mail message is stored only temporarily for the duration it takes to route the message to the next post office(s).
In e-mail systems which use mail servers, post offices deliver incoming messages to a mail server which persistently stores the messages for the recipients. The recipients access the messages via the client applications. In some systems where mail servers are not used, the post offices deliver e-mail messages directly to the client applications. The e-mail client applications are end-user applications for creating, reading, and managing a user's individual e-mail account.
The fundamental operating paradigm of conventional post offices and mail servers is unabated delivery, which is intended to deliver an e-mail message from its sender to its recipients as directly as possible, with no interference from other users or administrators. Thus, a conventional post office receives and routes a message as quickly as possible, and does not purposely delay routing in order to process or otherwise delay the message. Existing e-mail protocols, such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (Internet RFC 821), all are intended to operate by unabated delivery.
With the increasing reliance on e-mail for all types of corporate communications, it is becoming increasingly desirable for an organization to be able to define and automatically enforce communication policies with respect to the handling of e-mail messages in their e-mail systems. An organization should be able to define specific business rules which implement its business communication policies, and apply these business rules to all e-mail messages on the e-mail system in order to monitor and control the distribution and handling of e-mail messages. In particular, it is desirable to provide such business rules within a post office, so that the business rules may be applied to all e-mail messages handled by the post office, regardless of their origin or destination.
Conventionally, however, organizations have not had the ability to define and automatically enforce communication policies with respect to the handling of e-mail messages by post offices. This is because conventional post offices are designed to implement existing e-mail protocols, which are based on unabated delivery. As a result these post offices are not designed to apply business rules to e-mail messages which either intentionally delay or prohibit delivery of e-mail messages. Delayed, intercepted, or prohibited delivery is antithetical to the unabated delivery concept, and thus, conventional post offices do not provide this ability. Similarly, conventional mail servers, which normally only serve messages to client applications, do not process or otherwise delay message delivery in order to apply business rules thereto.
At best, most available e-mail systems do allow the individual user of the e-mail client application to define how e-mail messages received or sent by that specific e-mail client application are to be handled. For example, the user of an e-mail client application may decide to store e-mail messages received from particular senders in various mailbags or directories. However, conventional e-mail systems do not enable the organization to define specific business communication policy based rules for the post office itself to use in order to control the delivery of e-mail messages. Since all e-mail messages are received and routed by a post office, it is desirable to provide such ability directly at the post office rather than at the individual client application, which would at best provide only limited, and inconsistent rule application.
It should be noted that from a technical standpoint, conventional post offices do employ routing rules for routing and addressing e-mail messages. These rules however, are merely physical, data, or transport layer protocol rules (layers 2, 3, 4 of the OSI model), and describe only the low level handling of the e-mail message. Control of the delivery of e-mail messages by the post office itself is at the application or session layer (layer 7, 6). Thus, existing low level filtering rules do not provide the desirable ability to define business rules which implement business communication policies for handling e-mail messages.
E-mail messages are but one type of data object which are communicated over networks. In addition to the use of e-mail systems, organizations use their internal and external networks to distribute and route many other types of data objects, such as database records, forms, application programs, and so forth. However, there as yet appears no mechanism by which an organization can control the distribution of such data objects in light of business communication policies. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a generalized data server that includes the ability to define business rules for handling the distribution of various types of data objects.